Saving Agnes

by Rachel Cusk

  ‘Oi, Wayne,’ said the one who had spat. ‘What do you reckon to this lot, then?’

  He nodded in Agnes’s direction. She felt sure Greta’s assailant hadn’t been called Wayne.

  ‘Dunno, mate,’ said Wayne. He grinned nastily. ‘We could send ’em down the tunnels for the night, I suppose. They won’t know they’re living.’

  Wayne’s mate found this hypothesis hilarious and guffawed loudly. One or two of the tramps by the door sidled surreptitiously out into the street.

  An attractive woman emerged from the escalator, and both guards followed her with their eyes as she passed through the barriers.

  ‘I could fancy that,’ said Wayne’s mate. ‘Fancy a bit of rough, my dear?’ he yelled after her in a plummy voice.

  The girl passed close to Agnes as she left the station. Her face was burning. Back inside, the guards had forgotten her already and were laughing about something else. Scum, Agnes thought. Absolute scum. She wanted to run after the girl and offer her something: friendship, loyalty, invisibility, whatever she wanted. We should stick together, she would say. She would tell her about Annie. That was what happened to you in the end. You had to stick together.

  More people hurried through the barriers. Agnes craned her neck to see beyond them. She wanted to get a better look at Wayne’s mate.

  ‘Last train!’ he shouted just then. ‘Ten minutes till the last train!’

  He turned his back and leaned against the booth. Agnes looked at her watch. She had not realised it was so late. She would have to come back tomorrow. The tramps began pulling blankets out of plastic bags and unfurling them against the wall at the back of the station. They were bedding down, and would remain there till morning if Wayne’s mate did not succeed in luring them to the tunnels. Agnes knew she had to go home. She had no choice, any more than they did. It was who she was. Even so, with the alternatives lined up against the wall like convicts, she was fascinated by the opportunity of change. She could lose it all just by doing nothing. Just by staying here, she could become someone else. There would be a certain freedom in having nothing. The possibilities were endless.

  She went over to the ticket machine and got out her purse. It was empty. She had given the last of her money to Annie. A knot of panic began to grow in her stomach. It was all right, she could go back to Greta’s house and maybe spend the night there. It was several seconds before she remembered telling Greta not to answer the phone or the doorbell. She could phone home and ask Merlin to meet her at the door to pay for a taxi. That was the answer. She found a telephone and reversed the charges. There was nobody at home. Agnes stood in the cold neon-lit station and felt a wave of desperation rise up in her throat. A middle-aged man in a camel-hair coat was coming through the ticket barriers.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said politely, approaching him. ‘I’m trying to get home and I don’t seem to have any money. I wonder if you could help me.’

  He hesitated momentarily, surprised. She could see him trying to work her out. He looked away and walked past her. The outrage! She stared after him, dumbfounded. As if it wasn’t obvious what kind of person she was! She caught her reflection dimly in one of the steel plates fixed to the wall and was surprised. She looked scruffy and old. It had been a long day. A woman came off the escalator and approached the barriers. Agnes felt her heart swell with relief. She looked kind and would surely be sympathetic.

  ‘Excuse me—’ she began, before remembering how far this approach had got her last time. The woman had stopped and was looking at her expectantly. ‘Can you spare me some change?’ Agnes blurted out.

  The woman immediately looked embarrassed. She sighed and put a hand in her pocket.

  ‘Oh, all right,’ she said, holding out a ten-pence piece. ‘Although why you people can’t get jobs like everyone else escapes me.’

  She clicked smartly off before Agnes had time to respond. So much for change, she thought. Ten pence indeed. Wayne’s mate had been observing her progress and now sauntered over to the ticket barrier.

  ‘Oi, you,’ he said. ‘Clear off.’

  Agnes looked at him with barely disguised distaste. The badge on his lapel read ‘Kevin’.

  ‘Kevin!’ she said. ‘I might have guessed. How incredibly original.’

  A man was approaching from the escalator. He was about her age. He looked like he might understand.

  ‘I said clear off, you old tart!’ said Kevin.

  ‘I assure you,’ Agnes replied, ‘there is nothing I would like better. But first I must draw your attention to a certain matter.’ She smiled winningly and pointed at his trousers. ‘Your flies are undone.’

  As he looked down, she walked over to the man and stood purposefully in front of him.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she began.

  He looked at her and her heart almost stopped. It was John. His hair a bit longer, perhaps, his clothes different. Something was pounding in her chest.

  ‘Can I help you?’ he said presently.

  Agnes felt faint. He didn’t recognise her, then. She stared at him in silence.

  ‘Do you need money?’ he said. He delved into a pocket and took out some coins. ‘There. I hope that helps.’

  He smiled at her and began walking away. Agnes looked in her hand. He had given her two pounds.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  He stopped and turned around. He looked almost ashamed.

  ‘It’s the least I can do,’ he said.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  AGNES sat at the wooden table in the kitchen of her family home. It was late evening. Outside, against the dark sky, the darker shadows of bats swooped and spun like falling leaves. Agnes’s mother, bare-faced and dressing-gowned, made tea with the air of one rallying round.

  ‘It’s funny that you’re here,’ she said presently. Agnes did not attempt to deny it. Tom’s coming home tomorrow. You must have smelled trouble with your sixth sense. You always were good at that.’

  ‘What on earth do you mean?’ said Agnes, aiming for a specific rather than a general explanation of her parent’s meaning. ‘What sort of trouble? What’s happened?’

  The house had seemed quiet and strangely unfamiliar when she arrived. They hadn’t been expecting her, and their unpreparedness made her feel as if she had happened unawares upon a secret behind-the-scenes existence; like a restaurant in the early morning, the chairs on tables, the smell of disinfectant, someone pushing a mop around perhaps.

  ‘He’s lost his job,’ said her mother. ‘They told him a few days ago. For some reason, I thought he’d have told you himself.’

  She looked rather flushed with the unexpected responsibility of relaying information of such newsworthiness.

  ‘Lost his job?’ Agnes was incredulous. ‘But – but how could he? How?’

  ‘He didn’t just drop it in the street, dear. There is a recession on, after all.’

  Agnes’s mother had grown up during the war, and found the vocabulary of that harrowing period indelibly fixed in her memory.

  ‘Poor Tom. I wonder what he’ll do. God, it seems so unfair.’

  ‘Life is unfair!’ replied her mother rather shrilly. ‘We’ve always tried to protect you children from disappointment, but I’m afraid we just can’t any more. You have to find out for yourselves what it’s like. Your father and I can’t pick up the pieces whenever things go wrong, you know!’ She went to the sink and turned on a tap. ‘We’re too old.’

  She began washing up a teapot. Agnes stared at her dumbfounded.

  ‘You’re not old,’ she said. ‘And besides, no one’s asking you to pick up the pieces.’ She thought of adding ‘don’t be so melodramatic’ for old times’ sake, but decided against it.

  ‘Aren’t they?’ sighed her mother. She dried the teapot with a towel which Agnes recognised as one she used to take to the swimming-pool. ‘Well, I don’t know, in that case. I really don’t,’ she insisted. ‘First Tom calls up in a state. Then you arrive on our doorstep looking like death warmed up
with heaven knows what problems. What are we expected to do? It’s hard to – to readjust to all this.’

  Agnes found this speech rather wounding. While in moments of happiness and high confidence she would not have minded in the least her mother’s retirement from parental services, and indeed would probably have actively encouraged her liberation, her current state of despondency cast a somewhat different light on things. She did not want to hear that her primal protector had been replaced by someone offering tea and limited sympathy. It was not a fair exchange.

  ‘Well, what did you expect?’ she said crossly. ‘Did you think we’d both be safely ensconced in nice country houses by now having babies?’

  ‘I was,’ her mother replied; somewhat cruelly, Agnes thought.

  ‘Well, I’m sorry we can’t all be like you, then. The fact is, we can’t just stop being your children.’ Such logic, if nothing else, was certainly a throw-back to the old days. ‘You’d hate it if we didn’t run to you with all our problems, Mother,’ she continued with a semblance of maturity. ‘You know you would.’

  Her mother smiled wanly and sat down at the table.

  ‘Yes, you’re probably right. But I must say, it makes a pleasant change to have the temper tantrums oneself occasionally.’

  ‘That was nothing,’ Agnes returned. ‘You missed out the bit about not asking to be born.’

  She grinned edgily. The times when she had sought exemption, immunity – perhaps even grace! – with such claims to innocence were still too fresh in her memory to regard with more than passing irony.

  They had to collect Tom from the local station because his company car had been rescinded. Such seizures made Agnes fearful of the brutal arena of office politics. As they swung round the corner to find Tom sitting forlornly on his suitcase in the deserted forecourt, Agnes saw in his destitution evidence of a cruelty she had long suspected lurked behind the civilised façade of corporate life. He had ceased to please them, and they had ejected him from their circle without a thought to loyalty or love. One had to watch one’s back these days, she reminded herself. There were a lot of funny people about.

  The car stopped and positions were shifted by silent consensus. Agnes’s father vacated the driver’s seat and removed to the back, where Agnes soon joined him from her earlier place in the front passenger seat, now occupied by her mother. Tom, afforded the rare opportunity to assert himself unchallenged in the family hierarchy behind the driving wheel, now however chose this moment to demur.

  ‘Come on, Dad,’ he said. ‘You can’t sit in the back seat like someone’s old granny. You drive.’

  ‘Not at all,’ declined their father politely. ‘I’m quite happy being chauffeured about. I’ve got Agnes here to keep me company. You sit up there with your mother.’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ grumbled Tom, getting in. ‘But I hope you realise this is playing havoc with my masculine role-models.’

  Agnes was becoming increasingly aware that her father was happy to take the back seat not just in the most literal of senses. She looked at him as the car pulled out on to the road, and saw in the harsh daylight that his hair had now turned completely white.

  ‘Dad, you’re so old!’ she almost said; but managed ‘I’m so cold!’ instead.

  ‘No stamina,’ he replied, fumbling about behind him for a rug. ‘There, that should fix it.’

  He had, she saw, long since substituted kindness for authority. Leaning against him with the gentle pull of the car, her mother’s grey head bobbing serenely in front of her, Agnes saw in the cycles of all their ageing new evidence of compatibility. They too, she realised, had once been children. They didn’t ask to be born either.

  ‘Shall we have a fire?’ said Agnes’s mother when they got home. The wind had grown fiercer overnight and was whining beneath the door jambs and round the window-panes.

  ‘Good idea,’ said her father. ‘I’ll chop some wood.’ He waited hopefully for someone to relieve him of the burden of his offer. ‘Unless Tom feels like hefting an axe,’ he added, when no one did.

  ‘Do I have to?’ said Tom, whose masculine role-models were evidently once more intact.

  Agnes offered to assist him, and the two of them made their way out to the old shed where their father had used to breed rabbits. Their community had long since become extinct, and the ruins of old hutches were stacked against one wall to make room for the woodpile, which, Agnes’s father had found, required less upkeep and could be consumed without undue sentiment.

  The shed smelt mouldy and dank. It was a country smell, strong and not altogether unpleasant. It summoned equally strong memories. She could not recall having smelt anything so pungent in her years away from home. The odour gave her a strange sense of those years being effortlessly wiped away. The life she had left behind only yesterday seemed already indistinct.

  ‘This won’t be enough,’ said Tom, examining the small pieces he had gathered from the floor of the shed and thrown into the large basket they had brought with them.

  He picked up an axe and began chopping more wood. The pieces cleaved cleanly from the gnarled blocks, as if they had always had within them the seeds of separateness. A fresh smell of pencil shavings wafted through the shed.

  ‘Can I have a go?’ said Agnes.

  ‘Okay.’ Tom looked at her doubtfully. ‘Be careful, though. You could cut yourself. It’s sharp.’

  Agnes reined in a remark concerning the contrasting bluntness of his views on gender stereotypes.

  ‘Put your hands lower down,’ said Tom, observing her critically. ‘No, not like that. You have to bring it down harder. Put your foot on it, woman. That way it doesn’t roll.’

  She hefted the axe and brought it down on the block of wood. It split into two with a sharp crack.

  ‘Bull’s-eye!’ she said gleefully.

  ‘Now cut those into two. They’re too big.’

  ‘They are not! Leave them alone. They’re perfect.’

  ‘They’re too bloody big.’ Tom sat down on the woodpile. ‘Go on, let’s see you do it again.’

  ‘Okay.’ Agnes raised the axe above her head. ‘Watch this.’

  The block of wood toppled over on impact and was sent spinning away to the other side of the shed. Tom began clapping sarcastically.

  ‘Shut up!’ Agnes went to retrieve it. ‘I was just practising.’

  Her next blow was more successful. She threw the logs in the basket and picked up another block. She had begun to work up quite a sweat.

  ‘Let’s have a go,’ said Tom.

  ‘No.’ Agnes wielded the axe. ‘I’m enjoying myself. Besides, I’m armed and dangerous.’

  ‘It was only a matter of time,’ mumbled Tom.

  They picked up the basket and carried it by the handles back to the house.

  ‘I did more than you,’ said Agnes.

  ‘Well, that’s not my fault. You wouldn’t let me do any. Anyway, mine are better than yours.’

  ‘They are not!’

  ‘They bloody well are. Mine are art.’

  They staggered into the kitchen and put down the basket.

  ‘Oh, well done,’ said their mother, beaming at her united offspring hopefully. ‘So, did you have a nice chat?’

  ‘Agnes is too macho to chat.’

  ‘Tom’s a male supremacist. He couldn’t chat to a woman unless she was gagged and tied to a chair.’

  ‘Really, Agnes! Do you have to be so vulgar?’

  ‘Who’s vulgar?’ inquired their father, looking up from the paper.

  ‘Never mind, Alex.’

  ‘I must say, I do object to what they show on the television. I can hardly understand what they’re saying these days. All they seem to do is jump in and out of bed, as if that was all anybody did!’

  ‘Lunch is ready,’ said their mother firmly.

  ‘How’s your love life, Agnes?’ persisted her father; a question he had put with increasing frequency over the years, as he realised that something in his general bearing safeguard
ed him from receiving any kind of detailed answer.

  ‘I don’t have a love life, Dad. I’m too busy.’

  ‘She has a kind of love time-share,’ interjected Tom.

  ‘Besides,’ Agnes confessed, ‘there’s no one around these days – no one that I like, anyway.’

  ‘Don’t know what’s got into chaps these days,’ said her father. ‘Pretty girl like you. In my day they would have been queuing up at your door. These days they queue up for social security.’

  There was a moment’s silence in honour of the death of romantic England.

  ‘I can’t think why they call it security,’ opined her mother, putting dishes on the table. ‘Tom feels very insecure without a job, don’t you, dear?’

  Agnes and Tom glanced at each other across the table. Tom raised one eyebrow and began passing plates around in silence. A few minutes later, however, a loud guffaw escaped from their father’s lips. He leaned over and patted his wife’s arm fondly.

  ‘That was very good, dear,’ he said. ‘Very good.’

  ‘They’re both completely bonkers,’ said Tom. He turned around and looked at the house, from which they had just emerged to go for a walk. ‘Good thing they live out here, at any rate.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Agnes.

  ‘Well, if they lived anywhere else they’d probably have been locked up by now. I suppose it’s one of the privileges of wealth. You can go nuts in your own secluded home.’

  Agnes thought she detected something untoward in his tone, as if he meant it seriously. She did not respond. They were approaching the very spot where they had argued several weeks before, the ill-feeling of which occasion was still fresh enough in her memory to make her not want to resuscitate it.

  ‘So what’s wrong with you?’ said Tom suddenly.

  ‘Nothing.’ Agnes opened the small gate at the bottom of their garden and strode out into the field beyond. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Dunno. I just thought you only came home when you had something to moan about.’

  ‘You should know by now,’ retorted Agnes, becoming riled, ‘that I like to have the occasional luxury break from my spartan socialist existence. And I really don’t see why you’re trying to wind me up.’